Before the
war it was not unusual to hear people of many sorts, (particularly of
the so-called professional or intellectual type) express their admiration
for the successes of fascism or for the personalities of their leaders.
Perhaps, they said, fascism has really brought a new idea to the world.
They have found a new solution for the social crisis that dominates our
time.

Success always
has a certain fascination.

Today, the
total bankruptcy of fascism is recognized by everyone as the biggest flop
in history. German anti-fascists have always declared that fascism had
nothing new to offer, neither new ideas nor even the intention to find
such ideas  that it was nothing more than good, old-fashioned barbaric
|489-90| reaction  a more forceful
and efficient suppression of the people than ever before invented 
made more efficient by borrowing and stealing from all sides, digesting
and adapting everything to their totalitarian purpose.

We musicians
are apt to consider our art as something a little apart from life and
its crises. But on the other hand music is extremely sensitiv to all social
trends. When fascism first touched German music, German musicians found
it difficult to understand this contradiction. If Flaubert for instance
could write and publish Léducation sentimentale under Napoleon
III1 why couldnt a modern German composer
continue to write chamber-music under Hitler?

There is
a reason: fascism, more organized and brutal than everything Napoleon
III could imagine, cannot afford even the slightest dissonance in their
artificial harmony  or a breath of opposition even in the most abstract
and remote arts and sciences. Everything is controlled. Physics, mathematics,
even the art of landscape or still-life painting are observed as being
potentially dangerous.

What does
fascism require of a musician? Nothing and everything! First of all, preserve
the musicial traditions of the past. Good performances of classical music,
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart continued. There was even an attempt to continue
the Weimar Republics programme of `bringing good music to the masses.
On the other hand there was an energetic encouragement of the folk music
movements. It was in folk music that they hoped to find an attractive
substitute for the dominance of American jazz in the entertainment, field
songs, dances, operettas, etc. Perhaps the clearest way to understand
all these problems is to imagine yourself as a modern composer trying
to survive fascism. What must you do? If you are young you have to find
your own way after you have digested the innovations of Arnold Schönberg,
Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók. But before you begin, fascism
stops you. The music of these three modern masters has been labelled as
Kultur-Bolschewistisch, degenerate. Their works are forbidden and if you
follow them you will find yourself in a dangerous position. What does
fascism have against these three masters? And why especially against Schönberg,
the most hated of these? Schönbergs music reflects the complexity
and crisis of our times. If I may say so, he expressed long before the
invention of the airplane the fear that one experiences in an air-raid
shelter under bombardment. Everything fought for by the Nazis  enthusiasm
for their |490-1| imperialistic goals, devotion
to their leader, conformity to their way of life  all this is challenged
by the work of Schönberg. The loneliness, despair, torment expressed
by Schönberg, as modern society confronts him, are unacceptable to
the nazis. In 1942 Herr Goebbels reafirmed the rules which the state authorities
laid down for the artists:

`No art
for arts sake, no individual choice of subject. The artist should
express the newly risen spirit of the Reich, he must avoid psychological
problems and depict the Nazi soldier-type, the worker, the city, the
industry.

According
to such standards modern music became the enemy of fascism.

If you write
modern music, you will have to follow certain rules. Go ahead, write it,
but if you want it performed and to be supported by the Nazis, you must
write an eclectic style, steering cautiously between Richard Strauss and
certain moderate moderns. Has a school of modern German music come from
this base? I am happy to report  no. And not for lack of talent!
The majority of responsible modern German composers living in greater
Germany prefer silence, writing and hiding their new works supporting
themselves as conducters in provincial operahouses? Teachers, arrangers,
etc.

When I was
in Prague in 1937 I was visited by a young German composer who had sneaked
over the border as a tourist to show me the score of his new opera, based
on the events of the Thirty Years War. This extremely gifted work was
written in a most advanced style so that aside from the revolutionary
tendencies of the subject, the music itself, as Kultur-Bolschevismus,
was unacceptable to the Nazis. When I proposed a Brussels performance
of the overture alone, he was terrified.

`The Gestapo
would ask me how I had not presented my score to the proper art authorities...
And they have a most unpleasant manner of asking questions  even
of musicians. So he prefered silence  waiting for better weather.2

Let me tell
you another story: A young German refugee composer called Leibowitz was
hidden and protected by the French underground during the German occupation
of Paris.3 As a gesture of gratitude he rehearsed
secretly (with five French musicians) one of the most modern works of
Schönberg  the Quintet for Woodwinds.

The French
musicians were most delighted to do this. All France was tired and disgusted
with the endless mass-singing of the German soldiers, bellowing their
folk and military |491-2| songs. This music
of Schönberg expressed at least the feeling and suffering of a human
being in difficult times. These are not unique cases.

Another aspect
of modern music is the so called Gebrauchsmusik  a sort of
departure from modernism by those composers who were left unsatisfied
writing only for the concert hall, and wanted to bring music closer to
real life, even declaring that music is obliged to serve a concrete purpose.
In the famous festivals of Donau-Eschingen and Baden Baden, we experimented
with the media of theatre, film, radio, music for bands, community singing,
schoolchildren, short operas, etc. There were two tendencies in this field.
The right wing interpreted their task as purely functional any function
was good enough  dentists congresses or folk festivals. The
left wing had a more realistic interpretation of this new function in
music  the closer relation of music to practical life. The value
of this music was to be measured by its usefulness to the people in their
struggle. And this struggle was the struggle against reaction and fascism.

This left
wing of Gebrauchsmusik was naturally a very specific enemy that
had to be annihilated by Hitler. The right-wing, however, with its programme
of simplicity in music, flexibility for all purposes, was welcomed and
assimilated. But in ten years, all this ideas of functional music boiled
down to simple marching songs, so called workers songs and patriotic jingles.
The popular composer had his difficulties too. Obviously all German popular
music within the past twenty years borrowed or stole from American jazz.
Even the grandpa of the Viennese operetta, Léhar, began to swing
a little. The statements and decrees of the Nazi authorities, forbidding
all jazz music as the product of lower and degenerate races broke like
a thunderbolt over the amusement market.4
But there were two alternatives. You could color jazz with a fake folklore
dress, or, as Hitler was a close friend of Franco and has some friends
in the Argentine too, Latin rhythms were permitted. Heaven alone knows
how many foxtrots were dressed as tangos and rumbas  no one had
told Goebbels about the African origin of the rumba. So American jazz
in sheeps clothing, has survived in the Hitler-Regime.5

About folk
music itself let me say only that the industrial revolution in Germany
ended folk music a hundred and fifty years ago  and its so-called
revival under Hitler is a purely |492-3|
artificial and manufactured task and has nothing to do with the real tradition
of folk music. This is a museum matter in modern Germany and not the basis
for creation of new musical life.

In the field
of music Hitler has met defeat as total as at Stalingrad. Not even successful
Quislings have appeared in the ranks of modern German composers. It is
refreshing, to report that in the years of crime and corruption in Germany,
German music remained silent. No Hitler symphonies, no Goering operas,
no Goebbels quartets, no Horst Wessel tone poems. Although money and power
were offered as never before good music and honest musicians were and
always will be arch-enemies of fascism.

2. Eisler
is most probably referring to Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-63) and his
chamber opera Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend which was composed
in 1934-5 and first performed in Köln in 1949.

3. René
Leibowitz (b. Warsaw, 1913) went with his parents to Paris in 1926. He
studied composition, first in Berlin with Schönberg from 1930 to
1933, then with Anton Webern in Vienna.

4. At
a meeting of radio directors [Radioindentanten] in 1935 it was decided
that `Nigger jazz shall as of today be prohibited across the entire German
radio network (evening edition of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 12
October 1935),

5. For
a more precise account of popular music in fascist Germany, see Wicke
(1985).